


Sailcats

by Chiennoir



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M, Horror, Humor, Mystery, Parody, Romance, Science Fiction & Fantasy, complete and utter nonsense
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-04-19 13:29:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 32
Words: 17,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14238315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chiennoir/pseuds/Chiennoir
Summary: Photojournalist Trib Inkwell has spent his career trying to expose shady doings at Los Alamos National Laboratories. He is certain that corners are being cut, environmental protection laws are being broken, and hazardous radiation is, in his words, "oozing out of the place like lies out of a politician." Tonight he will discover that his suspicions are frighteningly true -- though not in quite the way he expected.(Based on a true story.)*Disclaimer: This is a parody, written by a marginally stable author with the help of a couple of clearly unstable friends, against their better judgment. It contains complete and utter nonsense, roadkill, hyperbole, bad puns, awkward sex, and blatant flouting of the laws of science.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> "We must not stand in the way of progress, lest we become a road pancake." - Anonymous

_LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO: After a garbage truck destined for a local dump in Los Alamos County, NM, set off radiation alarms,_ _local officials leapt into action._ _The Fire Department sealed off the dump, the truck was driven to an isolation building,_ _and a hazardous-material unit from Los Alamos National Laboratories arrived to investigate. The source of the “harmlessly low” radioactivity: kitty  litter. The cat in question had undergone cancer treatments using radioactive iodine 181._

 

In 1994, the above paragraph appeared in small print with a boring headline, on the back pages of obscure newspapers that nobody reads.

One man, however, did read it. He also knew it was all a lie. This is his story.


	2. Chapter 2

Sitting at his desk in Los Alamos, a brilliant but woefully under-appreciated atomic scientist by the name of J. Robert Doppelganger found himself mired in a bit of a quandary: Whether or not to take the obscene amount of cash offered him by a Chinese terrorist in exchange for a lump of plotzonium 256.

“I discovered the stuff,” he reasoned, pulling a stained and greasy brown lunch bag from his desk drawer. “I should be able to give it to whomever I please.”

“Ah,” countered his conscience, “but think of the terrible consequences should you decide to perpetrate this traitorous act. Plotzonium 256 is the most volatile radioactive substance on earth. One-tenth of a gram, processed correctly, would be enough to reduce this building to a pile of glowing, quivering dust. Should it fall into the hands of evil genius Hu Son First, who knows what terrible fate could befall the planet!”

“Hmm,” thought Doppelganger, picking up the leaded-glass paperweight that contained a commemorative sample of his discovery. “That would be bad.“

He slapped some more cheap yellow mustard on his olive loaf sandwich, looked dreamily out the window into the parking lot, and noticed, once again, how shabby his old green Toyota looked floating along in that endless sea of gleaming white Lincolns. Then he looked at himself. The threadbare trousers, the mustard-stained tie, the socks that never seemed to match. He slammed the paperweight down on the desk so hard it set off a small chain reaction, burning a sad little hole through the latest issue of  _Playparticle_  magazine. He watched the tiny mushroom-shaped plume rise unenthusiastically to the ceiling, and at that moment he made up his mind.

Enough was enough.


	3. Chapter 3

Hu Son First glanced furtively around him, imagining an ambush around every corner. The stained brown bag sagged with the weight of the small lead box which contained his prize.

" _Plip, plip, plip, plip..._ ” The sound of flip-flops on the sidewalk!

Hu stopped, listened. Silence. He spun around, catching a glimpse of a shadowy figure slipping into the shelter of a doorway. He began to walk, more quickly this time.

" _Plip plip plip plip plip..._ ” the footsteps followed menacingly, relentlessly, behind him.

Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead, moistened the palms of his hands. The bag fell from his grasp and landed on the sidewalk with a dull thump. The blood began to pound in his ears.

The footsteps quickened.

Seeing an opportunity to escape, Hu snatched up the bag and boarded a bus. He didn’t know its destination. He didn’t care.

He rode the bus for several hours, until well after dark. He got off at a deserted stop a couple of blocks from his house. He tiptoed down the alleys and sneaked through back yards until he arrived home. Once inside, he retrieved a can of his favorite beer from the fridge, settled into his favorite chair to watch his favorite episode of  _Seinfeld_ , and finally began to relax. His cat, Hu Flung Pu, greeted him with his usual indifference. Hu lifted the cat onto his lap and ran his hand along the sleek black coat, trying to think of a suitable hiding place for the little box and its toxic contents.

Yes!

The answer came to him in a flash. A place no one in his right mind would think nor dare to look. A place where angels fear to tread. Hu dropped the surprised cat and whisked the brown bag into the utility room. From it he took the lead box, not noticing a tiny fissure that had developed in one of the seams during its encounter with the sidewalk. He kneeled, gingerly placing the plotzonium 256 in its new hiding place.

At that moment, Flung Pu nudged his way into the litterbox and finished the job, burying the deadly package under a pile of PP-Fresh Super Clumping Kitty Litter.


	4. Chapter 4

Hu awoke early the next morning, refreshed and sure in his belief that he was doing the right thing. Soon his visa would expire, and he’d have to take his family back to to Beijing. No more pretending to be the mild-mannered manager of a laundry on Pearl Street. No more sneaking around in search of Western comforts. No more laundering the proceeds of his illicit dealings in Persian Garlic Powder and Colombian Oregano. Face it. He was a powerful man now, and it was time to reap the fruits of his labors. No more communist government oppression for him. “No more,” he laughed. “No more!”

He would fashion the plotzonium 256 into a small, unobtrusive nuclear device. He would plant the device right in the middle of the Forbidden Tavern, right in the middle of town. Then, if the government would not agree to his simple demands, he would push the button and produce a small, unobtrusive nuclear fireball that would vaporize the tavern and everything else inside of a square mile.

Ah, power. It felt good. Too good. Maybe his demands were  _too_  simple. He tore a sheet from a faded yellow legal pad and began a list.

Hu read over his list, adding things here and there like "with sprinkles" after "Blue Bell Double Chocolate Chunk ice cream." Time to start the wheels in motion, he thought. He went to the phone and called his travel agent. He packed his suitcase, leaving just enough space for the greasy brown bag.

Upon entering the utility room, it didn’t take him long to figure out that something was terribly wrong. Something was missing. But what? The early morning sunlight streamed in through the open windows, bringing with it some cottonwood fluff and the light, fresh scent of the summer morning.

That was it. Litterbox odor. There wasn’t any. He scrabbled frantically through the particles of fresh, clean clay.

His worst nightmare had come to pass.  _His wife_ _had cleaned the cat box_!

Hu stood in shocked silence, his blood frozen in his veins. He stood there for nearly a minute before hearing a low, mechanical grinding sound that made the rest of the blood drain from his already pale face. He rushed from the house, frantically waving his arms.

"Stop, stop!" He screamed it in English, in Chinese, in Spanish, back to Chinese, and finally in some unintelligible gibberish that involved random hand gestures and kicking.

The retreating garbage truck ignored him as it knocked over his mailbox and lumbered away in a cloud of dust.


	5. Chapter 5

“Hey, Nico, c’mere and look at this, man!”

The New Mexican sun beat down on the State Penitentiary Highway Clean-up Crew, who, undeserving of anything more creative, were referred to by the locals simply as “those cretins.”

Nico sauntered over to take a look at the spot in the road Jimmy was indicating. He started laughing.

“Eee, that’s the flattest cat I’ve ever seen! Hand me that scraper, vato.”

Nico slipped the scraper, essentially a large metal spatula on a rake handle, under what remained of a large marmalade cat, and flipped the flattened feline off the asphalt. The corpse went spinning into the gravel at the side of the road, where it tumbled end over end before coming to rest, like a warped quarter set rolling across a table.

“Dude,” yelled Nico. “Heads up!” He walked over, picked up the creature’s remains, and tossed them like a frisbee. Jimmy deftly caught the corpse behind his back, but quickly dropped it when he realized what he was holding. Several other crew members gathered around the action, and they began to toss the ex-cat back and forth between them. Jimmy sent the cat’s body flying up into a high arc. The on-duty guard, in a rare moment of frivolity, pulled his service revolver and neatly plugged a hole through the orange disc at the apex of its flight.

“Okay boys,” he said, “fun time’s over. Get that cat into the truck and let ’em take this load to the landfill.” Jimmy and Nico looked at each other, then Jimmy picked up the two-dimensional beast and chunked it over the side of the truck. The truck sped off to the west, leaving the road crew coughing in a cloud of highway smoke.


	6. Chapter 6

Flung Pu was decidedly upset. His contract deal with Lilian Jackson Braun had fallen through, and his pathetic excuse for a servant had switched to some new type of canned cat food. He hated it. It clung like a fungus to the side of the feeding dish, leaving him pitifully licking the petroleum-byproduct gravy off of the food. This, in turn, gave him stomach cramps and the need to waste far too much valuable nap time hanging around the litter box. He silently vowed that he would get even with the Kit-T-Nibbles folks if it was the last thing he... hey, was that a cricket?

The cricket slipped beneath the door to the outside world, and Flung Pu followed through the cat flap, emerging to the warmth of a beautiful summer day. He made an executive decision to lie in the grass.

That was when he saw it.

A baby bird. A tiny, helpless, weak, tender baby bird. Just across the street. Almost enough to make up for that sorry tease of a dinner that he’d managed to subsist on for the past few days.

Flung Pu’s mouth started to water. His glossy black form was perfectly camouflaged as he crouched in the shadows on his side of the street, tail twitching. He listened for any sign of the baby bird’s mother. He watched as the bird wobbled around on the grass. His pupils narrowed to tiny slits. He initiated a pre-attack butt wiggle. He charged.

 _KA-THUMP!_  went the wheels of Dr. Doppelganger’s shiny new Lexus. But with the double wishbone suspension, road noise damping, and seven-speaker Infinity sound system playing Prokofiev, he didn’t hear a thing.

He would come to wish that he had.


	7. Chapter 7

Midnight. A cool breeze washed over the Los Alamos County Landfill, collecting reeking reminders of the day’s contributions as it went. These reminders wafted lazily to the east, a little to the south, then swirled playfully through Trib Inkwell’s open bedroom window.

The pungent plume wound its way past piles of neglected laundry, empty pizza boxes, and past-due notices before it finally arrived under the nose of the sleeping journalist. It pushed aside a bourbon-flavored fog and a slight headache, finally coming to rest at the edge of his consciousness and asking it to come out and play. Trib stirred, foggily swiping at the offending zephyr with his hand and rolling over, burying his face in a pile of dirty laundry. This new smell was rather more aggressive than the first, bringing him suddenly and fully awake. He reached for his glasses, knocking over a half-empty can of something that might once have been cola.

“Roadkill day again,” he thought wearily. He made his way to the windowsill, absently removing a stray sock which had snuggled up next to his Pulitzer Prize. He cranked the window closed and began to draw the drapes. “Wha...?” He blinked and wiped his glasses on the hem of his T-shirt. He balanced them on his nose again. It was still there. It was unmistakable. A soft, pulsating blue glow, hanging dreamily over a tiny mound in the center of the landfill.


	8. Chapter 8

Flung Pu’s eyes flickered, blinked, and dilated until they became glowing green orbs. His tail twitched involuntarily. Synapses sputtered, then snapped to life.

He felt like crap, like he’d been hit by a… wait a minute. Something wasn’t right. He smelled like rubber. He looked down at the mangled version of himself he’d become. Memory burned like a brush fire through his neurons. The bird. The charge. The sudden, brief pain. The blackness. And now this... this other thing.

This was not kitty heaven. This was horrible. Every bone in his body should have been crushed, yet he was conscious. He could move. This wasn’t right. It couldn’t be. Internal nerves started registering that awful feeling of a hairball that he couldn’t cough up. Spasms wracked his body. He lay there, flopping around like a fish on the beach, feeling as if he might explode. A terror of helplessness overcame him, but he could not pass out, he could not die. Wasn’t he supposed to be dying? A deafening wail of anguish filled his head, but no sound escaped his windless lips.

Then it was over. His autonomic functions shut down, leaving his higher brain and muscular controls intact. No more pain. He felt kind of warm and floaty, in fact.

He stood and assessed this new kind of body — a body that shouldn’t be functioning at all. Everything might have been rearranged, but it all appeared to work just fine. If anything, his senses had become more acute, more finely tuned. His eyes scanned the horizon, and finally came to rest on something he understood. Not too far away, the warm lights of a neighborhood glowed reassuringly, and he instinctively felt drawn to them.

It was time to get moving.


	9. Chapter 9

Trib pulled on his pants, stuffed his feet into some shoes, and searched among the accumulated debris for his camera and a notebook. He came across the former settled comfortably between a carton of fried rice marinara from Mario’s Szechuan Palace and a coffee mug which proclaimed “If you had my job, you’d drink too.” The notebook had somehow made its way into the toilet and was therefore of no practical use to anybody, so he left it there.

He headed toward the door, pausing to attend to Azalea, a fat cross-eyed Siamese who had discovered a most distressing lack of available cat food. Trib filled her bowl with a pile of beef by-products which had been dried, pounded and tortured into the shape of tiny fish. Azalea curled around his leg, arching and purring in grateful feline ecstasy. He wondered briefly how cats could think this was something to get ecstatic about, then judged the phrase “cats think” to be an oxymoron. He could still hear the purring as the screen door banged shut behind him.

A slight smile crossed Trib’s face as he focused and snapped away. There had been rumors of shady doings at the labs; of money-saving midnight trips to the dump to dispose of "mostly harmless" radioactive waste; of tight-lipped denials of any wrongdoing and the payoffs that kept those lips from moving.

For months he had been waiting, watching patiently for some sign, some slip of the pen or the tongue that would confirm his suspicions. Some absolute, concrete proof. Then he would expose them all. Blow the lid off the bureaucratic pressure cooker, sit back, and enjoy the show.

Until now, all he had were a couple of photographs of three-eyed sparrows and one grainy videotape of a lab employee and a local congressman making some sort of deal in the alley behind a strip club.

But no matter. The friendly little blue glow beckoned, reminding him that his Pulitzer Prize must be lonely all by itself and perhaps it was time to acquire another.

Azalea joined Trib in his basement office as he developed the pictures. She divided her time between feigned interest in the proceedings and sitting on the sill of the window that looked out, just at ground level, upon an expanse of weed-choked lawn.

When he was finished, he stood back to admire his handiwork. He had captured the glow from several artistic angles. There was the evidence he had been searching for all this time. There was…

“Wha?” He looked closer. There, at the edge of one of the pictures, was a pair of glowing green dots, set into a dark, vaguely cat-shaped smudge.

His thoughts were suddenly shattered by a sharp hissing noise. He wheeled around to find Azalea frozen on the windowsill, an arched Halloween caricature with her tail puffed up like a bottle brush. He squinted out the window, and yes, there was something. A shadowy figure, vaguely feline but somehow distorted, twisted, unnatural.

“Ugh,” he thought. Those cretins had allowed some of the roadkill to fall off the truck. He began to compose a scathing letter of complaint in his head, staring at the dead cat for inspiration.

And then it moved.


	10. Chapter 10

The police had received the phone call at about seven that evening. Someone had discovered the body of an elderly hiker on a hill overlooking the county landfill, his face covered by little tufts of orange fur. The officers called to the scene didn’t know what to make of it, and weren’t inclined to make an educated guess about much of anything yet.

The paramedics made a preliminary diagnosis of suffocation, coupled with myocardial infarction. The man had been smothered by something fluffily orange, and then his heart had failed.

“Suffocatin’ succotash!” joked a sergeant.

The chief of police worried that they had a psychopath on their hands. A serial killer, perhaps, who dispatched his victims with a shaggy orange pillow. As he assigned a team of detectives to solve the crime, he wondered how long it would be before the killer claimed his next victim.


	11. Chapter 11

Dr. Doppelganger was beginning to hear things. Large amounts of money will do wonders for the sensitivity of your ears -- not to mention your eyes, and probably other interesting body parts as well. He sat on his bed, looking at the neat stacks of cash on top of his dresser, watching it vibrate with the unmistakable frequency of evil -- and a couple of harmonics of betrayal thrown in for good measure.

“There’s something about guilt that makes a hallucination seem like the most natural thing in the world,” said the money.

“Stop that,” replied Doppelganger, “I don’t need money telling me what to do.”

The money started to laugh. A high-pitched, rhythmic, barking sort of laugh, like a Scottie dog who’d been trained to perform the backbeat on “Jingle Bells.” For a long time this laughing went on, as Doppelganger stared wide-eyed at his money, and then it stopped, echoing around his tiny bedroom like the closing of a jail cell.

The money spoke again. “Money not telling you what to do,” it snorted derisively. “You really believe that, don’t you? Sad. Pitiable. Pathetic.” Bills began to float up and spin around in front of his mirror, until he found himself witnessing a cloud of Franklins and McKinleys whirring and fluttering in front of him. He screamed at it, and the bills fell once again into their neat little stacks.

Doppelganger chuckled to himself. “No one tells me what to do. Not anymore.”

Just as he was drifting off to sleep, he heard a raspy meow at the window, which had been cracked open to let in the night air.

Oh, hell. He thought he’d taken care of that days ago. With obscene amounts of money came power -- the power to get a quickie divorce and send your annoying harpy of a wife packing, along with her equally annoying and eternally shedding marmalade cat, Punkin. He’d sent both of them off in his battered old Toyota on Wednesday. Apparently Punkin couldn’t take “eff off” for an answer, and had returned to torment him.

“Eff off, cat,” said Doppelganger, picking up a shoe and throwing it in the direction of the sound.

He smiled at the satisfying scrambling noise that followed, leaned back, and adjusted the covers with a contented sigh.

As he was drifting off to sleep, he thought he saw something slip through the gap between the window sash and the sill.

“Just another hallucination,” he thought, and closed his eyes.


	12. Chapter 12

As he made his way across the reeking pile of softly glowing sand, Flung Pu was assessing his situation. Being two-dimensional wasn’t so bad -- in fact, it had some decided advantages. Take dogs, for example. Usually, the sloppy snuffling sound which heralded the approach of a member of that inferior species would cause the blood to freeze in his veins and his fur to stand on end. Now, however, he appeared to have no blood to speak of. His matted fur stuck out every which way, so it was hard to tell whether it was standing on end or not, so why bother.

This knowledge seemed to fill him with a sort of calm courage, and he found himself actively seeking out the ubiquitous curs which roamed the landfill. He found that by turning and facing them head-on, he could become all but invisible. A sharp hiss, delivered from this position, invariably sent the dogs yelping and scurrying away in terror. No, this wasn’t so bad. Not bad at all.

Flung Pu strolled along, contemplating his new existence and purring slightly to himself. He approached the row of modest houses that bordered the landfill and spied a fetching silhouette in one of the basement windows. Could it be? Oh, God. Such a vision could only mean that this was kitty heaven after all. She was a Siamese. He could tell. The slightly kinked tail, the round, soft body pressed against the windowpane, the graceful licking of the paws -- a thin pane of glass was the only thing separating him from paradise. He stood transfixed for a long time, entranced by the beauty in the window. He began to move closer. He longed to gaze into those exquisite crossed eyes.

 _“HISSSSS!”_ The lovely vision suddenly puffed herself up and spat at him. She leapt from the windowsill and disappeared. He stepped back, confused. He sniffed at himself. Three days amongst the garbage had done little to improve his aroma, but it wasn’t that bad. It couldn’t be his breath -- he didn’t appear to have any. The fickle female would just have to be convinced.

Flung Pu squeezed through the slightly open window and prepared to turn on the charm.


	13. Chapter 13

This has to be the most frustrating thing I’ve ever done, thought Anasthesia Flores, Los Alamos County’s only certified forensic veterinarian. She had been contacted late that night by the chief of police to determine the origin of some animal hair found at a murder scene. Now, at one A.M., she was still examining the pumpkin-colored strands through a microscope and waiting on a spectrographic report.

She remembered what brought her into this line of work. Four years of college at Baylor had generated a B.A. in unemployment, forcing her to take a job as a rodeo clown. One hot Texas afternoon, the star cowboy’s steed collapsed, its heart failing just before the competition. The other cowboys pulled their pistols, aiming to plug the old horse. Anasthesia somehow managed to find the strength to flip the animal on its back and perform CPR on it, whereupon it came to and kicked the rodeo star square in the groin. The video soon made its way onto television, and brought her to the attention of a wealthy, animal-loving philanthropist who recognized her talent and offered to pay her way through vet school.

She returned to college, got her veterinary degree with honors, and landed a cushy job at a clinic in Beverly Hills. But after four years of dealing with Prozac-addicted toy poodles and their equally mindless owners, she decided she was dissatisfied with her position, and moved to the more cerebral community of Los Alamos.

Performing this mind-numbing work at one o'clock in the morning, however, made her miss her old stomping grounds and the regular hours that came along with it.

At first glance, the fibers were almost certainly of feline origin, but the spectrographic analysis was so peculiar it left her with more questions than answers. She had run into a dead end, and was about to give up when the night janitor passed through the room and sneezed.

"Eureka," she thought, "definitely cat hair. I’ll sort the rest out later." She picked up the phone and called the police with her results.


	14. Chapter 14

Trib Inkwell rushed from the room to find his camera. He snatched it up from its resting place among the sofa cushions, and hurried to the basement window. He tripped over Azalea, who hissed and spat and ran under the credenza. He stumbled to the window and raised the camera. A thick, eerie blackness met his eye, and twined its cold, clammy fingers around his very soul. Er... wait a minute. Something was wrong here.

“Dammit!” He snarled, tore off the lens cap in a transport of frustration, and hurled it across the room. He peered through the viewfinder, lowered the camera, blinked and rubbed his eyes, and peered again. He was certain he had seen something move out there on the lawn, and he was even more certain he had seen that pancaked black cat. And now it was gone.

He fished the lens cap from a cup of cold coffee, still puzzling over the strange events of the evening. He dried it on his shirt, replaced it with utmost care and tossed the camera back onto the sofa. A fuzzy black shadow seemed to become startled by this. It leapt from the sofa and disappeared under the closet door.

“Wha?” Trib examined the sofa. Nothing unusual there, just the normal accoutrements of everyday life. A not-quite-empty pizza box. A litter of Scrabble tiles, mostly vowels. Several unwashed articles of clothing, in various stages of fermentation and decay. Cat hairs.

Trib scratched his head. Everything was as it should be. Or was it? Something about this friendly clutter was bothering him. It was becoming decidedly less friendly. Downright sinister, in fact. He looked closer. He sneezed. Azalea never made him sneeze. The formula for Siamese dandruff was just different enough from that of regular cat dander that it never seemed to bother him.

Again he squinted at the offending spot. Just to make sure, he pressed his face deeply into the sofa cushion, and immediately produced an explosive sternutation that left no room for doubt. He rubbed one of the whiter socks over the cushion. It was cat hair, all right. Black cat hair.

“Hmm,” he said. His eyes began to itch as he examined the sock and its unusual collection of feline filaments. He located an antihistamine and swallowed it.

Sensing movement, he wheeled around. That elusive black smudge insisted on staying just beyond his field of vision. He sat on the sofa to ponder the situation. After a while, Azalea crept out from under the credenza, and crawled into his lap in a most unaccustomed display of affection. He stroked her absently, trying to make some sense out of the evening’s events. Soothed by the effects of the antihistamine and Azalea’s purring, Trib found himself drifting off to sleep.

The furtive black shadow slipped silently under the sofa.


	15. Chapter 15

“Did you say what I think you said?” shouted police chief Geraldo “Harry” Gonzales. “We have some crazy pendejo asphyxiating people with  _cats_?” He casually flipped his gun into the air and caught it -- a nervous habit designed to make other people just as nervous.

“That’s what it looks like, chief,” replied the extra-sleepy voice of Anasthesia Flores. “Either that, or it’s some weirdo wearing a cat hair coat.” It was now nearly one thirty, and she had spent the last fifteen minutes calling every all-night diner in town in hopes of finding the police chief, who, for some inexplicable reason, refused to use a mobile phone.

She had finally caught him at the Waffle House -- which would have been her first choice had she known about his fondness for the song “Special Lady at the Waffle House.” It reminded him of his days as an underage fry cook, where a buxom waitress named Earlene had shown him all the secrets of love.

The smell of syrup made Harry feel nostalgic. After Earlene died in a tragic hot-curler accident, he had given up cooking and joined the police force. Only after years of therapy could he set foot inside a Waffle House again.

Now he was standing at a pay phone, wondering how to apprehend the bizarre killer that had just come across his path. He expressed his thanks, and hung up.

A cat-killer. He tried to shake off the thoughts of a slinky woman in a body stocking and a mask traipsing around the mountains with henchmen to perpetrate the cat-asphyxiation of unwary campers. “The purrrrrfect crime,” she would say, and then laugh her catty laugh.

“To the Batcave,” he mouthed silently to himself.


	16. Chapter 16

A gentle sawing sound told Flung Pu that it was safe to emerge from beneath the sofa. Cautiously he poked his head out, and seeing no movement to speak of, he allowed the rest of his body to follow. There, settled in a most fetching pose on the lap of the snoring journalist, was the object of his desire. She, too, was asleep, her whiskers and the crooked tip of her tail twitching in response to some amusing feline dream. He stood very still, drinking in her exquisite beauty and gathering the courage to speak to her. He knew that only he, Hu Flung Pu, descendant of countless generations of virile Chinese Laundry Cats, could quell the smoldering passion that lay beneath those voluptuous layers of feminine feline fat. He knew that only she, Azalea of the sky-blue eyes, could silence the voice that rang through his flattened soul, crying out for true love. But what to say? Deciding that words were too crude for such a tender moment, Flung Pu crept up and snuggled beside her, purring softly into her ear.

The whiskers stopped twitching. “Flip,” went the tip of the tail. “Flip... flip... fli... ” Then it too was still. Something resembling a thought slowly formed inside Azalea’s underused brain and floated drowsily to the surface. Something smelled funny. Like that mouse carcass she had left out in the sun too long.

“Ah, the goddess awakens,” thought Flung Pu rapturously. He reached out a paw and gently touched her silky coat.

The eyelids snapped open. The dark pupils in the crossed blue eyes opened wide. The sight they encountered triggered an immediate response. With a howl, the fat Siamese suddenly went rigid, dug her claws deeply into the leg of her owner, and hurled herself straight into the air. She landed with a thump on the coffee table, careened off a stack of empty beer cans which fell to the floor with a terrible clatter, and launched herself into the next room.

The antihistamine was no match for the claws and the noise, and Trib came suddenly and painfully awake. His eyes went first to the pain in his thigh, where they noticed dark stains beginning to well up through several small holes in his trousers. Then they traveled cautiously to the right, where they met another pair of eyes -- glowing green ones -- set into a two-dimensional face. The face of what once had been a good-sized black tomcat.

“Whaaaaa?” thought Trib.

“Uh-oh,” thought Flung Pu.

The two sets of eyes peered at one another in disbelief.

Trib sat, stunned. “No one is gonna believe this.” Sensing a need for concrete evidence of his story, he grabbed at the apparition, only half expecting to connect with solid matter. The cat-thing fought and twisted its way out of his grasp and flattened itself across his face. Unable to breathe, he swatted desperately at the thing, which finally let go and ran over the top of his head. He watched in horror as it streaked across the room and disappeared through the mail slot.

“Damn,” thought Trib. Then he sneezed. He opened his shaking hands and examined the palms. He sneezed again. There was his evidence. Cat hair. Sad, matted little tufts of black cat hair. He put them into a plastic film container and looked through the Yellow Pages, wondering where one would go to find some band-aids and a good forensic veterinarian at two o’clock in the morning.


	17. Chapter 17

The telephone rang. Anasthesia rolled off her pillow and struggled to open her eyes. The telephone rang again. She looked at the clock, realized that she’d only been asleep for fifteen minutes, and decided to let her answering machine handle the call. She heard its beep in the other room, followed by a voice.

“Um, Dr. Flores? This is, uh, Trib Inkwell. Investigative reporter for the  _Monitor?_ I hate to bother you, I mean your machine, or whatever, at this hour, but I’ve just been attacked by a cat... well, not a  _normal_ cat exactly... but it might have been... um... how to say this...” The voice paused for a few seconds, and the recording cut off automatically at the silence. A moment later, the phone started ringing again.

“Oh, hey. It’s me again. Your answering machine cut me off or something. Anyway, I was attacked by some sort of cat thing, except it was, um, well, squished. Flat. Like a Cuban sandwich. Oh man, this sounds really stupid. Anyway, I was wondering if you could, uh, help me make sense out of it. Gimme a call, 555-9564. ”

Anasthesia stumbled out of bed and staggered into the kitchen, where she made herself a cup of instant coffee and listened to the message again. Something very strange was happening in the feline world, she thought. She called Trib Inkwell’s number.


	18. Chapter 18

“Hello? Oh... yes... Dr. Flores...” Trib shifted the phone, pinning it between his shoulder and chin as he attempted to tend his wounds with a cotton ball and a bottle of antiseptic. It refused to be be subdued, and began a purposeful attempt to slide down his arm. “Yes, uh-huh. Cat. Some kind of flat... OW! Ooh, geez...” The phone slipped, hitting the bottle of antiseptic, which spilled all over Trib’s lap. His hands went to his stinging leg, forgetting all about the phone, which fell to the floor with a clatter. He reached for the errant instrument and put it to his ear. Dial tone. Damn. He tapped the “redial” button.

“Yes... doctor? It’s Trib Inkwell again. Yes, I have a good hold on the phone...” Against his better judgment, he pinned the phone again and began to pull on some pants. It made him nervous to be talking to a woman while clad only in his underwear. “Yes, I know what time it is.” So far so good. One foot poked through the proper hole in the trousers. “Of course I think it’s an emergency. I wouldn’t have called you if I didn’t think it was an emergency...” He hopped around on one foot, sliding his other leg into the pants. A toe caught. The phone dangled at the end of its springy cord for a short indecisive moment, then fell on his foot. A few seconds later it rang.

“Hi again. No, I don’t seem to be having much luck with the phone.” The voice on the other end was laughing now. He felt a blush rise to his face, wishing the voice wasn’t so damned female. “What... now? It’s two o’clock in the... yes, I suppose it would be easier to talk in person. The Waffle House? I suppose... well, okay. I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”

Trib hung up the phone, found his car keys and headed for the door. A cord tightened around his ankle. Again the phone crashed to the floor. He stared at it for a long moment, until it began to beep and complain. It said that if he wanted to make a call he should dial the number immediately, and if not, to please hang up.

“Bite me,” he told it, and left it there.


	19. Chapter 19

Katherine “Kitty” Furfine dropped some change into the ancient pay phone, and dialed her best friend’s number. She was weary from a day of hiking with her kids in the Santa Fe National Forest, the beautiful mesa country around Los Alamos. It had been much better than their weekend at the Grand Canyon, where the pavement was hot enough to burn her feet through her shoes. 

They had enjoyed the day, hiking a spur trail down the canyon rim for an hour or so and ending with a tour of the ruins at Bandelier National Monument. The kids were angry with her because she had forbidden them to throw rocks, pine cones, and each other off the cliff dwelling overlook ("Mom, you always spoil _every_ thing,” they had cried.) Now they were settled in at the Happy Pig Campground in White Rock. Kitty sighed. She hated camping.The thought of not having a nice warm shower in the morning was almost more than she could bear.And she was worried, even more than usual. The ranger at Bandelier had told her that there'd been an "incident,” a lone hiker found dead in the area, and that she should be careful.

Kitty heard a familiar voice say "Hello?" distorted by the crackles and gaps of a bad phone line, and felt instantly better. She began to regale her friend with the events of the day, anxiously watching her children as they bounced on a trampoline. 

So far, her visit to New Mexico had been great. She had enjoyed spending time with her sister in Taos, although the commune she lived with gave Kitty the willies.Some of the people were very nice, she corrected herself. Like the holistic practitioner who had given her acupuncture for her migraines.He had put needles here and there, and sent electrical currents through them (her muscles twitched at the memory), and he had been charming. A 60-something, nice Jewish doctor from Long Island who had given it all up and joined the hippies. 

But she was discussing the strange death with her friend, now, and her kids were jumping higher and..." _STOP THAT RIGHT NOW!"_ she bellowed. " _ONE_ at a time!". " _NO, YOU CAN'T BOUNCE ELLEN ON HER HEAD!_ "

The other campers looked over at her, and she was suddenly self-conscious about her "Keep Calm and Kiss My Ass" T-shirt. She felt embarrassed and irritable. She raised the phone again and winced in pain. She had forgotten about the acupuncture needle still in her ear.It was supposed to stay there for several more days to complete the treatment. Well, it worked, she thought.Her head didn't hurt anymore. Her ear did. 

The phone crackled and the distortions increased. Kitty wondered if the rumored radioactivity around Los Alamos might have something to do with it. Her friend sounded anxious, and Kitty didn't feel like explaining her outburst, since it would sound like an episode from _I Love Lucy._ "I can't hear you. There's something wrong with the phone. Can you speak up?” Then the crackling stopped and the line went dead. “Damn,” she grumbled, “and that was my last quarter, too.” She hung up the phone, promptly forgot about it, and ran to the trampoline to scream at her kids again. So much to worry about, she thought. Well, tomorrow would be her last day here. They'd hike along Frijoles Canyon, and then go to a nice motel to shower and get a decent night's sleep. Then back to Korea, where she would only have to worry about plumbers who connected her thermostat to the water pipes, maids who cooked over open fires in the bedrooms, and security people who demanded that she send a fax to request assistance while someone was breaking into her house. 

She herded the boys into their tent, and she and little Ellen settled down in hers. One more night under the stars, she thought, wondering what form her nightmares would take tonight. 


	20. Chapter 20

Trib had run the story through his mind a thousand times. Try as he might, there was no way he was going to come up with a version of it that didn't sound like the product of a brief but torrid flirtation between a bottle of cheap Scotch and a dangerously hyperactive imagination. There was certainly no chance of this happening before he pulled into the parking lot of the Waffle House. The yellow prefab building loomed in the glow of his headlights. He could see the outline of a white-coated figure sitting in a booth next to the window. He drove around the block a couple of times. Bad idea. More bizarre details added themselves to the narrative that was forming in his head. He sighed and parked the car. 

Anasthesia dozed over her coffee, brought to consciousness occasionally by a grating voice that shrieked "REFILL, HONEY?" in her ear every five minutes. She looked at her watch and sighed. Ten minutes. Right. 

"Bonk."

This was interesting, thought the vet’s sleepy brain. A new sound for a change. 

"OW," screamed Trib's forehead as it collided with the plastic lamp that hung over the booth. "Er... hello,” said his mouth. 

"Mr. Inkwell? Hi. Annie Flores." She stood and extended a small, delicate hand. 

He hesitated, wiping a suddenly sweaty palm on his trousers. This was awful, he thought. If she had been ugly it would have made things go so much more smoothly. She wasn't. She had chestnut brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, long-lashed dark eyes, and a pleasantly curvy body that could only be described as “huggable.” He took the hand and shook it, probably too hard. His mind grimaced. His mouth smiled nervously. So did hers. So far so good, he thought.

“Is your name really Anasthesia?” Trib said, and immediately regretted it. “That’s um…kind of unusual.”

“Yeah. It is,” Annie sighed, resigned to telling the story for the millionth time. “That’s what my mom was screaming in the delivery room, just as the nurse was asking her what name to put on the birth certificate.” She rolled her eyes. “At least they had the good sense to spell it wrong.”

“Oh,” said Trib. “I’m… um…”

“Don’t be sorry,” Annie smiled. “I’m used to it. Or that’s what I tell myself, anyway.So, what’s this about being attacked by a dead cat?" She glanced at the blood that had seeped through his trouser leg. "Looks like it did some damage."

Trib slid into the booth. ”Well, it wasn't dead, exactly. I mean, it looked dead. It was flat as a board. But it wasn't, well, inanimate. It made a pass at my Siamese. It scared her and she scratched me." He sat down. He noticed that Dr. Flores was even less ugly at this angle. 

"A pass? It made sexual advances?" A tiny smile danced at the corner of her mouth.

"Yes. "

"You should have your cat spayed." The smile wrapped itself enchantingly around the lip of the coffee cup.

"I did. I mean... _I_ didn’t ... the vet... but she is. Spayed." His mind grimaced again, wishing she would stop that smiling. It was very disconcerting. 

“Good." Annie looked at him expectantly, waiting for that narrative he had so painstakingly prepared in the car. 

The narrative was gone. Every eloquent detail of it. What was left was a rambling account that spilled from his lips with great animation but very little style.After he had finished, Trib berated himself. She'd never believe it, he'd embarrassed himself utterly, and his palms were sweating again. Suddenly he remembered the film container and pulled it from his pocket, putting it on the table between them. 

"What's that?"

"Cat hair."

Annie opened it and removed the matted bit of evidence. She looked at it very carefully, then appeared to make a decision. She stood, took some bills from her purse and slapped them on the table. "Come on," she said, smiling that devastating little smile and motioning for him to follow. "I have something to show you."


	21. Chapter 21

Kitty stared at the menu and suddenly didn't feel hungry. What a strange restaurant this was! She looked around. The wall decorations at first appeared ordinary. The usual moose head and deer antlers. ut then she began to notice the others.A two-dimensional armadillo with a white stripe painted on it, a grouping of flattened prairie dogs, a pressed opossum. 

"Maaaama, I'm huuuungry! Do they have any white food?"

Kitty suppressed her thoughts, and looked back at the menu, in hopes of answering her daughter. Ellen's tastes were usually easily satisfied. Plain pasta, plain bread, milk, Cheerios, and peas. Peas were the only non-white thing she ate, and she liked songs about them. "Peas I Ask of Thee O River,” and “Let There Be Peas on Earth" among them.Kitty smiled to herself, and involuntarily started to hum. She concentrated on the menu:

**_THE ROADKILL CAFE_ **

**_Order today's special and get a free bumper sticker!_**

**_Old Favorites:_ **

** _Chicken-Fried Armadillo_ **

** _Chicken-Fried Prairie Dog_ **

** _Chicken-Fried Possum Strips, served with today's Roadkill soup, pinto beans_ , ** ** _and fry bread_ **

** _Special: Raccoon Sausage with Pasta_ **

** _Soup of the Day: Chipmunk and Rice_ **

What kind of a place was this? Much as she liked deep-fried everything, this menu wasn't very appealing. She looked around again. It didn’t look like a tourist trap. All the characters at the bar looked like locals. The paunchy, grey-haired one in the black hat was snarfing down his meal with gusto, and pinching the waitress every time she came near him. He had just stuffed a particularly enormous piece of some mysterious meat into his mouth as she walked by, swinging her hips. He made a sudden movement to reach her, and started gagging. He was coughing at first, and then wheezing. Oh, this was awful! Those terrible choking sounds! 

Kitty slapped her hands over her ears to block it out, and awoke to searing pain.It felt like someone had put needles in her ear. She felt around. There _was_ a needle in her ear. Oh, yeah, that. Blinking away the discomfort, she considered her strange nightmare. That terrible choking sound. But, wait... the sound was still there!

The alarm bells went off inside Kitty's head. That choking sound was coming from the kids' tent. Steven. His asthma. Must be allergic to something, but what? Kitty fumbled for her flashlight, and then for Steven's inhaler while she tried to identify a possible allergen. She hadn't seen any cats around, didn't imagine any except maybe mountain lions, and the likelihood of that was pretty small. Of course, if there was a cat, Steven would attract it. For some reason she had never understood, cats seemed to innately be attracted to the people who most wanted to avoid them. The idea was ridiculous. What could possibly have set him off here in the arid New Mexico air?

She found the inhaler, and realized that there was not much of the medication left. Steven might need more, and that would mean a dash in the dark to find an all-night pharmacy. She hoped it would be enough to last until morning. She went to unzip the tent, and realized the zipper was already open. Greg must have gotten up to pee and forgotten to close it. She shined the flashlight beam toward Steven's sleeping bag, and saw what looked like a furry, orange rug on his chest. What the hell was that? Stuffed animal? She didn’t remember bringing any along on this trip. Kitty kneeled down to crawl into the tent, and the orange thing suddenly flung itself into her face. An overwhelming odor of decay sent her reeling as it pushed past her and shot out of the tent and off into the night. She deliberately slapped her ear and felt piercing pain. Well, she wasn't dreaming, anyway. 

Steven's wheezing and choking were very bad now. Kitty helped him with the inhaler and spoke soothing words, though shaking with worry herself. She waited for the medication to take effect. Two minutes. Five. He seemed to be having a very bad attack. The pharmacy wouldn't do. He was going to need medical attention. In a panic, Kitty roused Greg and Ellen, piled them all into the Jeep and sped off, as best she could over the rutted dirt road, toward the lights of Los Alamos. 


	22. Chapter 22

As they drove along in her car, Trib's imagination was developing various scenarios around what Annie might want to show him.If it weren't for that smile, such interesting thoughts probably wouldn't have crept into his mind.He made a mental note: Cat hair in a film canister.You never knew what might work. 

"Oh my God, there it is!" Annie shrieked. Trib looked out in front of the car to see what was going on. "Wow, it's moving really fast!"

A fuzzy orange streak passed in front of the headlights.Annie slammed on the brakes, bringing the vehicle to a gravelly halt on the side of the road.She jumped out, popped the trunk, and started rifling through the contents looking for a flashlight, spewing a stream of mild oaths.After a few seconds, she found one that actually worked.She fished out a collapsible Crit-R-Git-R cat trap, slammed the trunk shut, and took off into the trees after the thing, shouting at Trib to hurry up. He sprinted after her. 

He realized that he couldn't see a thing, save the beam of the flashlight every now and then a few yards ahead of him.He followed with both arms stuck out in front of him, navigating half by sight, and half by listening to her footsteps stirring the underbrush.Branches of trees flew past him. He shielded his eyes with one arm and forged ahead after Annie, stopping only after he'd nearly knocked her over. 

"Shh," she commanded, "It's up in this tree." His eyes followed the beam of the flashlight to where it met a pair of glowing green eyes, connected to a huge, flattish orange cat-thing about fifteen feet high in the branches.She handed him the flashlight, said, "I'm going up," and was on her way before Trib could protest. 

She was a natural for trees.Not even a minute had passed before she was at the same level as the thing, inching out onto its branch.He kept the flashlight trained on both of them, although at that height, through all the lower branches, it didn't do a lot of good.He moved underneath to get a better viewing position, with no idea what she was going to do now that she was up there. 

_CRACK!_  

Maybe her plan wasn’t as clever as it looked, Trib thought.He moved the flashlight around again, trying to see what was going on with the screams and the smashing tree branches. She landed on him with a thud, followed by a shower of bark and leaves.He lay there on the ground with her, trying to think up something cute to say when he caught his breath.She beat him to the punch. 

"Where is it? I think it came down with me."

Well, not that cute, but certainly better than anything he'd thought up yet.He got up and looked around with the flashlight. It had come down, all right — tufts of matted orange fur lay among the twigs that had accompanied Annie's fall.But the cat, if that's what it was, had vanished. 

“Are you okay?”

“Fine,” she answered, brushing off the debris and trying to ignore an ominous pain in her left wrist, which had already begun to swell. 

"Next time, you oughta take some Kit-T-Nibbles up with you."

"Don't be cute," she said."Hang on — what's that?"

She pointed at something reflecting the flashlight beam. 

There, on the ground next to the clumps of fur, was some sort of laminated identification card.Trib picked it up, and wiped off the smudges of dirt to read it."Pool Pass -- Happy Pig Campground." Scrawled on the pass, in black marker, was one word.“Furfine."

“What’s a dead cat doing with a pool pass?”

“What’s a dead cat doing up a tree?”

“Good point,” Annie frowned."Are you thinking what I'm thinking?”

“Yep. We'd better get over to Happy Pig."


	23. Chapter 23

Five-thirty A.M. 

Trib and Annie pulled into the Happy Pig Campground and RV Park just as the rosy finger of dawn jammed itself up the nose of yet another glorious New Mexico morning. 

A sleepy-looking security guard met them at the gate. "Twelve bucks please," he said, eyeing them suspiciously. 

They looked at each other, suddenly realizing what it was the guard was staring at. They were a mess. Bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, scratched, bruised, covered with dust, leaves and splinters of bark. 

“Er, we found this," said Trib, proffering the laminated pool pass. "We thought the people who lost it might be looking for it." 

"Furfine. Hmm," said the guard. "Oh, yeah. Mom and a bunch of noisy kids. They were in Space 18 over by the showers. Went tearing outta here last night like the devil himself was after 'em."

"They left?” Annie inquired. 

"That's what I said," replied the guard, rolling his eyes. "Good riddance, I say. The kids went around putting plastic wrap over all the seats in the latrines."

Trib took back the pass. "Space 18?" 

"Space 18. But you won't find 'em there."

"We'll check it out anyway."

"Suit yourself. Twelve bucks."

"Just to drive in and look for somebody? That's criminal."

“If I let you drive in for free, how do I know you won't sneak around and use the faculties? Use up some toilet paper or some soap? Walk on our scenical trails and pee on our scenical bushes? Sit at our recircled-plastic picnic tables? Somebody’s got to pay for all these amennonites, you know."

“Buddy, I wouldn't use your toilet paper on a bet," said Trib testily. "It's probably that sandpapery brown stuff that takes the skin off your…”

Annie dug in her purse, reached out the window and shoved twelve dollars under the guard's nose. "It's five o'clock in the morning," she said dully. "I'm tired. I'm dirty. I feel like I’ve had a run-in with the business end of a city bus, and I need to use the faculties."

The guard tipped his hat. "Thank you, ma'am. Enjoy your stay at Happy Pig. Oh yeah. I forgot to tell you. Pool passes are five bucks extra."

“Got one, thanks,” said Trib, waving it out the window as they drove through the gate. 

Space 18 was uninhabited, but not empty. Two tents containing sleeping bags, clothes, and lanterns still stood on the site. A red-checked vinyl tablecloth flapped under a cooler full of food on the recycled-plastic picnic table. A pile of ashes still smoldered in the little concrete fireplace. Two long skid marks led from the center of the campsite to the gravel road. Someone had left in a hurry. 

"Now what," asked Annie. 

"Wait for 'em," Trib replied. 

"How do we know they're coming back?"

"We don't. But chances are they'll come back for their stuff. And we paid twelve dollars to gain entry to this paradise. We might as well get our money's worth."

" _My_ money's worth," Annie grumbled, picking the leaves from her hair. "You wait for them. I'm going to find the shower." She walked to the back of the car, fished around in the trunk, removed a less-than-pristine towel and headed off toward a squat brick building marked "Sows."

Trib busied himself by beginning a minute inspection of the campsite, knowing full well he was only doing it to avoid thinking about that towel. It was undoubtedly having all the fun. 

One tent yielded nothing out of the ordinary. The other was more interesting. Two sleeping bags. Some comic books. A GameBoy. Nearly empty roll of plastic wrap. An empty container of Primatene. 

“Aaaaphlagf!" Trib sneezed. He felt his eyes begin to water and swell. He began to search among the folds of the sleeping bags, knowing what he would find. Aha! There they were. The now-familiar clumps of orange cat hair. He collected some of it, placed it in the film canister, and emerged from the tent. 

"Well," said a considerably cleaner and happier Annie. "You look like the cat that ate the… " she stopped short, suppressing a giggle. "Oh. That was hardly the thing to say under the circumstances, was it?"

"Hardly," he laughed. "But I did make some progress while you were gone. That tent is full of cat hair. Orange cat hair. All matted and clumped, just like what we found under the tree."

"That would explain why they left in such a hurry," she replied. “If one of those things came into my tent I'd beat it outta there too."

"So what do you think they are?"

"They're cats."

"Well, yeah. But cats don't make people tear out of campgrounds in the middle of the night. " 

"Let me finish. People are being smothered by cats. But they're not regular cats. Stop me if this sounds crazy, but I got a good look at that one up in the tree. They're flat.Pancaked. Like… well, like…”

"Sailcats!"

"Whatcats?"

"Sailcats," said Trib triumphantly. "You know, when someone runs over a cat and it bakes all dry and flat? Then the road crews come and pry it off the asphalt and fling it like a frisbee to the side of the road. Sailcats."

“That's the most disgusting thing I've ever heard." Annie stopped toweling her hair and looked Trib straight in the eye. "So you're saying there are dead roadkill cats coming to life and smothering people to death?" 

“Uh-huh." The detailed explanation he had prepared suddenly dissipated in a puff of warm, fuzzy confusion as she gazed steadily into his eyes. 

"And how, pray tell, are these sailcats managing this miraculous resurrection?

"I have no i… " A light began to flicker in Trib's mind. It all started…when? About the time he spotted that blue glow in the landfill. The black smudge on the photograph. The cat-thing on his lawn and then in his living room. "No, wait. Maybe I do know! Come on!” He suddenly jumped up and grabbed her hand, pulling her in the direction of the car. 

“What? Wait a second! Where are we going?"

"To the county landfill.” He pressed the car keys into her hand. "Now it's my turn to show _you_ something!"


	24. Chapter 24

Police Chief Gonzales was on his way home. The day had exhausted him. Thoughts of the cat-murderer prowled around in his mind, the darkness of the early morning exaggerating his fantasies. The smell of waffles and syrup had mixed into his imaginings, and he had mentally tried to pour his memory of Earlene into a lycra catsuit. He sleepily drove through the quiet streets and onto NM-501. His bed would feel mighty good. 

A white Jeep went tearing past him, and Gonzales, tired as he was, decided that he'd better teach that yuppie asshole a lesson. The area was just chockablock with them in the summer, driving their sport-utility vehicles, demanding arugula and goat cheese salads. Ruining the place. He turned on his lights and his siren, made a screeching 180-degree turn (he was proud of that, it had taken him months to perfect it), and raced off after the Jeep. 

He caught up quickly, and the driver in the Jeep obediently pulled over. Gonzales trained his lights on the vehicle in front of him, got out, flashlight in hand, and walked up to it. He shined his light directly in the driver's face (it always made them uncomfortable, and he enjoyed the feeling of power). He was looking at a youngish redhead with a panicked expression, and what appeared to be a large needle in her right ear. Gonzales shuddered to himself. This body-piercing thing was really creepy; he imagined she probably had a tattoo, too. One of those enormous rattlesnakes wrapping around and around her torso… 

"Ma'am, I need to see your rattlesna…uh, your driver's license and registration."

He saw that she appeared to be on the verge of tears, and heard a garbled stream of words."Have to hurry. My son. Asthma. Really bad. Out of medication!” "Gonzales shined his light around at the other passengers. There were two small children in the back, both apparently sleeping peacefully. The older boy in the front was watching the proceedings with interest, wheezing quietly now and then. 

"Gee, Ma, is he gonna arrest you? Awesome!"

Gonzales' beam swung back to the driver. He noticed now that she was dressed all in black; tight black jeans and a black T-shirt that said “Keep Calm and Pass the Vodka.” She was covered with tufts of orange fuzzy stuff. Where had he seen that before? He looked at the license she had given him. 

"Katherine, do you…”

"It's Kitty, sir. Kitty Furfine. I know I was speeding. I'm sorry. Please.I _have_ to get my son to a doctor. He's having an asthmatic reaction to something, and I ran out of medication. I don't know this area. Escort us to the Emergency Room? I'll pay whatever fine there is for speeding. Just…please,” her voice faltered. 

Gonzales considered. He was beginning to rue his decision to chase the Jeep.He wondered if he might be hallucinating. Kitty Furfine? That horrible needle in her ear, that oddly panicked look, and all that orange stuff.Suddenly, alarm bells went off in the police chief's brain. The Cat-Murderess. Could it be?

"Where are you staying, Mrs.Furfine? And where would your husband be?"

"We've been camping at the Happy Pig. Before that, visiting my sister in Taos. My husband is stationed in Korea. We're here on home leave. Please, officer.He could go into another attack any minute now." 

The Happy Pig, eh? Not particularly close to the landfill, but within "pouncing" distance. His imagination was working overtime, now. A Korean connection. He asked about the sister, and her answer made him even more sure. Those hippies. Had to be a terrorist cell. The FBI was always sending out warnings to be on the lookout for groups like that.That kid didn't appear to be particularly sick, either.

The two in the back were beginning to stir.“Maaaaa!I gotta peeeeeeeeeee!" the little boy whined. This woke the little girl, and she suddenly began to let out ear-piercing shrieks. 

Gonzales reconsidered. He didn't really want to take on a carful of little kids with small bladders and strong lungs. The woman _did_ look scared.Plus, if she was telling the truth, and he kept her from getting help, well… he didn't want to think about that. It would mean dealing with some tight-ass yuppie attorney for the rest of eternity.He decided to escort her to the 24-hour clinic in Los Alamos. That way, he could question her some more, about that orange stuff and her whereabouts the last couple of days.He looked at the ear-needle again and grimaced.His mind dismissed the snake, and substituted a snarling cat tattoo, vulgarly placed, with the caption, "Cat Got Your Tongue?" He shook his head and sighed.No rest for the weary. 

"Ok, Mrs. Furfine. Follow me. I'll need to see your tatt…uh, ask you some questions after we get your son taken care of."

Gonzales walked back to his car and pulled it onto the road, watching his rear-view mirror intently to be sure she was following. This odd woman was surely tied to that dead hiker, but how?


	25. Chapter 25

As they turned back toward the car, Annie and Trib stopped short. The air, still and damp with the dawn, had begun to shimmer.As they watched in amazement, the vague outline of a short, dumpy woman began to take shape. 

"Whoa." Annie backed into Trib, her eyes wide with disbelief. 

“Whaaa?" Trib squinted at the apparition.His arms automatically encircled Annie. 

She couldn't figure out if he was trying to be protective or just hiding behind her. Either way, the part of her that wasn't terrified decided it felt awfully nice.

"Wait a minute," Annie said, gathering her courage and reminding herself that she was a woman of science. "There's no such things as ghosts."

The phantasm's face, now fully materialized, barked back in a broad, grating Oklahoma accent. "Huh. Fat lot you know about it. You’re still alive, ain'tcha?" A blue-white arc of static electricity crackled from the figure's hands, kicking up swirls of dust and leaving the air smelling of ozone.

"Yikes," Annie said softly, and began to intone under her breath, "I _do_ believe in spooks. I _do_ believe in spooks…" 

Trib pulled Annie closer and replied almost bravely, “Who are you? What do you want?"

"This campground was built on the site of a Hooverville,” the ghost replied.“An Okie stopping-place on the road to California. Some of us never made it.Our spirits are still here, yearning to go west. Them peaches is near ripe."

"We aren't going to California,” said Annie. 

"We could give you a lift to the dump, though," added Trib. 

"Thanks a heap," the apparition snorted. "No, I came to warn you. There's strange things going on around these parts."

"No shit," Annie whispered. 

"Them cats! Them cats are comin’ back. And it's all your fault!"

Trib lost what was left of his cynical composure. "Our fault! Now just you wait a minute, lady!” 

The ghost pointed a pudgy, glowing finger toward the couple and wailed, "Your generation just lets ‘em lay out there on the road. Now you will pay for your wanton wastefulness. We knew what to do with roadkill during the Depression! We _aaaaaate_ it!” 

The exertion seemed to exhaust the energy of the ectoplasm, and the woman's figure slowly faded back into the shimmering dawn. Her hips were quite ample. It took a while. 

"That was weird." Trib said. 

“Gee, you think?” said Annie, eager to get back to the solid familiarity of the car and forget about all this ghost business. “You were going to show me something?” 

The two drove in silence for a while. Trib noticed that Annie appeared to be lost in thought, pondering some dark, important question. 

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing," she lied. The pain in her wrist was agonizing, but damned if she was going to be caught whining about it at six o’clock in the morning."I'm just a little puzzled about something."

"What's that?"

"Well, she said those people were starving.Starved enough to eat dead animals off the road."

"Yeah? And?"

"Well, if they really were starving? My God, how big was that woman's butt _before_ the Depression?"


	26. Chapter 26

Flung Pu slipped back through the mail slot, wishing that he could stop purring.In his condition, every vibration set up harmonic waves through his body, and eventually he would get to flapping around like a goldfish taken out of a pond.His shaking rattled the flap on the mail slot — there would be no question of his arrival. 

She was lying on the coffee table, her crossed eyes staring at him as he slipped in.He leapt onto the table to find her awake, fluffed up, and hissing.She was growling in a sort of undulating vicious hum, arching her back, eyes narrowed to slits of rage. In a flash she was on top of him, claws and teeth sending fur flying all over the table.He scampered away to the sofa. 

She sat there indignantly, bathing herself. 

He stood quietly, wondering what his next move would be.This was going to be harder than he thought. 

As he waited, he heard one, then another car door slam, and voices— one of the man who he'd encountered earlier, and another, female.They were coming inside! He dived under the sofa as the Siamese jumped off the table and walked towards the door. 

"This isn't the landfill," said the female voice. 

"It's my house,” the other voice said. 

"Uh-huh," said the female voice. "But I bet you've still got something to show me.” 

"Well, yeah.“ A key turned in the lock."Wait just a second while I get things straightened up," the male voice said.The door opened quickly, and he was inside.Suddenly, socks, plates, and unidentifiable objects came sliding under the sofa beside Flung Pu.The closet door opened and closed more than once.He heard the man's footsteps returning, and the turning of the knob on the front door. 

"Whoa," the female voice said."Are you sure this isn't the landfill?"

“Very funny.Come over here and look at this. " 

"Looks like an empty bottle of scotch."

"No, under the bottle.The pictures."

"Oh. You need to clean your lens. This picture has a smudge on it."

"Take a careful look at that smudge."

“See it? ”

"It's got eyes,“ she said. "Cat?”

“Black cat.” 

“ _Flat_ black cat.” Pause. "Trib, how many of these things do you think are out there?"

"Dunno.Two that we know of.You see the glow in this other picture?"

"Yeah, what is it?"

"Dunno.But I think it has something to do with this.I think it’s some kind of radioactive waste.We need to find a geiger counter and get out to the dump to… to… AAAaaaaaphlagh!!"

"Bless you.That's quite a sneeze you've got there."

"Thanks.For the bless you, not for the commentary on my sneezing ability.Damn! Look at all this fur! It's been here! Where's my cat?" 

Flung Pu had been wondering the same thing.

"There she is.Does your cat always growl at the sofa?"

The male human blew his nose."Not usually, no.Hang on, let me see.” He lifted the skirting on the sofa. He sniffed.His hand reached under the sofa, over Flung Pu's flattened form, and grabbed a half-empty can of cat food."Yep, this would explain it."

Azalea, drawn by the aroma of turkey by-products, forgot all about the intruder and went about emptying the can. 

The male voice spoke again."You know, I did a story on one of the nuclear physicists here in town a while back. I wonder if he could help us out?"

"Only one way to find out." The door again, then the two car doors, then the ignition.  

Flung Pu waited under the sofa for a while, just to be sure the coast was clear. He squeezed out from under a mound of dirty dishes and magazines. He peeked out. Ah, bliss! The Siamese was lying on her back with a lovely dark-tipped foot in the air, daintily licking her toes. She was teasing him. Just begging him to jump up and purr sweet nothings into those exquisite little ears. 

"Eeeeewwww," thought Azalea in disgust."I can't believe I _touched_ it.” She frantically tried to rid herself of the memory, rolling onto her back in a desperate attempt to clean every hair, every molecule of her being. But, try as she might, no amount of licking and preening would remove the taint. 

Flung Pu crept out from under the sofa, inching his way across the room in a roundabout way so as not to startle his lady love.Just as he was about to make his move, a car door slammed. Then another. Footsteps. A key turning in the lock. Damn. He darted behind the armchair and concealed himself under a pile of dirty laundry. The door creaked open and shut again.

* * *

 

"Well, what did you expect? It's seven o'clock in the morning.Of course Dr.Doppelganger isn't in his office. The labs open at eight.You can't even get past the guard until he's finished his first doughnut,” Annie said, with rather less patience than she had intended. 

"Hey, I've been awake all night too, you know," said Trib. "I’m not thinking very clearly. And I don't recall you saying anything about waiting until eight."

"Well, there's that," Annie said, softening a bit. She picked up the photographs. "When did you say you took these?"

"Three days ago," replied Trib, plunking himself next to her on the sofa. 

Flung Pu shifted restlessly under the pile of laundry. An obnoxious odor danced and swirled annoyingly under his nose. 

" _Hee hee hee_ ," giggled a pair of green plaid boxer shorts."Some hiding place." 

"You won't be able to stand it for long," added the Cuervo Gold T-shirt. 

"Trust us on this," said the socks. "We've been here since the office softball game two months ago. "

The smell was relentless. It tickled him. It taunted him. It played tag inside his nostrils. Oh, no. . . he was. . .going. . .to. . . 

" _Ksnx_!"

"Did you hear something?” Trib turned to Annie, who shrugged and shook her head."Azalea, did you sneeze?"

The Siamese looked up from her bathing, struck a “not me” pose and blinked uncomprehendingly. 

"Geez," scoffed the boxer shorts. "We waited two whole months for _that_? Hah. And you call yourselves laundry. "

The socks weren't about to take any crap from a mere pair of underpants. They redoubled their efforts. Flung Pu panicked as he felt the familiar tickle begin at the back of his throat. It concentrated itself right behind his eyes. He tried to block the feeling, but it was too late. It had reached critical mass. 

_"KA-SSSSSSSSSSSSNNNNNNNNNXXXXXXXXX!"_

"Aha!" Trib leaped up off the sofa."Over there!"

“Where?" Annie jumped to her feet. 

Flung Pu shot out from behind the chair, bolted into the utility room, and dived into the first dark space that presented itself. A spring-loaded lid banged shut with a metallic clang. 

"Did you see that?” Trib grabbed Annie’s arm, an afterimage of the speeding blur still dancing before him. 

“Ow!" Annie yelped. "Cut that out!"

"What's wrong?" He turned to her, suddenly concerned. 

"Nothing,” she lied. All the color had drained from her face. “Let go of my arm."

"Not ’til you let me see.“ Very gently, he pushed up the sleeve of her lab coat. “Damn. That’s impressive. Gimme the car keys."

She pulled the sleeve back down in a futile attempt to conceal the swollen, discolored mass between her elbow and hand."I just sprained it a little falling out of the tree. It's nothing, really.I'll take care of it later. " 

"Later, hell.I can't believe you've been driving around like that all night.Gimme the car keys.” He held out his hand. 

“I’m fine!” said Annie.

“Bullshit,” said her wrist. 

It hurt. It hurt a great deal, in spite of her efforts to make it do otherwise.And what was one more little setback? A sleepless night spent drinking bad coffee, falling out of trees, and chasing after murderous dead cats.Twelve dollars for a freezing shower in a dark, smelly building marked “sows." A little visit to the clinic was small potatoes after all that.Reluctantly she gave in, digging the keys out of her pocket and surrendering them into Trib’s waiting palm. 


	27. Chapter 27

"Well, doc," said the physician at the 24-hour clinic. “I’m sure you can tell me what this is.“ She slapped an x-ray film onto the viewer. Lots of delicate little bones lined up in orderly rows. 

"Looks OK to me," said Annie. “Can I go now?"

"You're right," said the doctor. "It is a perfectly normal wrist. But it's not yours.” She replaced the film with another. This one resembled a serving of Rice Chex into which someone had dropped a bowling ball. 

"Yikes," said Annie. 

"Yep," said the doctor. "Multiple carpal fractures. You aren't going anywhere for a while."

“But I can’t…I have to…” Annie protested. 

"I'll call your office," said Trib, laying a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “What’s the number?” 

Annie sighed and pulled a business card out of her pocket. 

He went into the lobby to use the phone, leaving her fidgeting as the doctor encased her arm in layers of plaster. 

“Plaster? Seriously?” She fumed. “Who snatched you out of 1969?” 

“In case you haven’t noticed, hon, this ain’t Santa Fe.” The doctor patted Annie on the back. “Keep still and let that dry for a bit. I’ll go get your discharge papers.”

At the front desk stood a tired-looking redheaded woman, barking impatiently into the phone. The woman had one small, whining child grafted onto her leg, and another tugging at one arm. A third sat nearby, happily blowing up a rubber glove and making rude noises with it. 

"No, I do not want to make an appointment at the clinic on the base.I am here with my son at the all-night clinic. I have been waiting here for five goddam hours for you to open up so I could call you and get our goddam _policy number_.Yes, I have a card. Yes, I know the number is on the card. It's in my wallet, at the foot of my sleeping bag, in a tent at the Happy Pig Campground in White Rock, New Mexico. Yes, goddam it, that’s the name of the place. Stop laughing and listen. The name is Furfine. F-U-R… No, you can't talk to my husband. He's in Korea. Just give me the… Ellen, stop that.You’re cutting off my circulation… oh, hell.” The woman ended the call and made her way to the reception desk, the little girl still clinging tightly to her leg. 

"I don't suppose you'd do something crazy like allow me to pay in cash.” She reached down and pulled a wad of bills from her sock. 

"Cash? Gosh. I don't know.” The receptionist looked confused. "I'll have to go ask my supervisor."

The redhead whimpered a little, collapsing into a chair. This dislodged the little girl, who stopped whining and began to howl. The woman sat there for a minute, then appeared to make a decision. She stood, reached over the reception desk and looked at the bill. She peeled some fifties off the roll, slammed them down on the counter and began to gather up her children. "There," she muttered. "Paid in full and a little extra.Let's get the hell out of here."

Trib balanced Annie’s business card on his arm and began to punch in some numbers.A synthesized voice told him that numbers beginning with 387 were not part of the local calling area and he’d have to dial 1 plus the area code. 387? That wasn’t part of Annie's office number. What in the world was he…Trib looked at the buttons on the phone. His sleepy brain suddenly made a connection. 3-8-7.  F-U-R.  F-U-Rfff…? Did she say Furfine? _Furfine_! "Omigod," he whispered, and raced out the door. " _Mrs. Furfine! Wait!”_


	28. Chapter 28

It had been a long night.Kitty wanted nothing more now than to get back to camp, collect their gear, and find a nice quiet motel in which to sleep the day away.She climbed up the stairs to the third level of the parking garage, and made her way to her vehicle. 

" _MRS.FURFIIIIIIIIINE!"_

“Oh, shit,” she thought, “That's what I get for trying to pay cash.” She leaned over the railing of the parking deck to see which hospital official would be running after her.Did they really have collection agencies on-site? If so, this was not the way to maintain a professional image.A lone figure, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, was running towards the parking deck.Fifty more feet into his sprint, he stopped and looked towards the parking garage, trying to decide which direction to take.He yelled again. 

" _MRS FURFIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE!_ ”

"Hey, mom! I think that man's calling you," pointed out her eldest little helper. 

"Hush.Get in the car." They piled in and she screeched into reverse, figuring that direct avoidance was the best plan for the moment.She barreled through the parking garage as quickly as she could without letting her kids enjoy the ride, and shot towards the exit.The man, not looking, jumped in front of the jeep, and she managed to hit the brakes just in time -- she was only traveling about twenty miles an hour when she hit him.He sailed several yards in front of the car, his head slamming into a support column as he came to rest. 

Kitty screeched to a halt."Oh, _shit!_ "

"That's fifty cents for the swear jar, Mom!"

She climbed out of the Jeep and dashed over to the man’s crumpled form.This was not happening.This was not happening.She couldn't have just killed a man.She knelt down to take a look at him. 

Oddly enough, there was no blood anywhere.Odder still, he was awake. 

"Mrs.Furfine? I'm glad I caught you," he said."We need to talk."

 "Yeah.I think we do."

Little Ellen toddled over to Trib with his glasses balanced on her nose. Her round green eyes peered at him through the lenses, which were, by some miracle, unharmed. 

There was a large purple swelling developing over the man’s right eye, and though all his major body parts appeared to be intact, he still didn’t look so good. He stood, wobbling a little. It was hard to believe that anyone could stand up at all after a shock like that. He seemed to be managing just fine, though he wasn’t making much sense.He was waving a plastic film canister and babbling something about dead cats at the landfill. Kitty put his glasses back on his face and steered him toward the clinic, her brood trailing after. They had ceased to whine. This new guy was interesting. You could hit him with cars and he just kept going. — sort of like Wile E.Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons. 

Once inside, Kitty propped him up against the reception desk and went in search of a doctor. He seemed quite happy there, with the little knot of kids gathered around his feet. They sat very still, watching intently to see if he was going to do any more cool stuff, like maybe fall down an elevator shaft. 

“You did _what_?” A voice boomed down the hall. “And you _moved_ him?”

“I hit him with my car. But he’s walking just fine, and I thought...” Kitty followed at the heels of the doctor, who grabbed a wheelchair and stormed into the waiting room. 

“Jesus,” said the doctor. “Never move someone who’s been hit by a… ” She looked around for the poor unfortunate, with visions of ruptured spleens, broken necks and severe concussions running through her mind. “Where is he?”

“He’s right there.” Kitty pointed to the man leaning lopsidedly on the reception desk. 

He did look a little dazed, perhaps, and he had a biggish bruise on his forehead, but he sure didn’t look like a guy who’d been slammed into by a car and bounced off a concrete pillar. Still, one could never tell about these things. 

“Excuse me,” said Trib mildly.“Is this really necessary? I’m fine, really. ”

“You’re probably in shock.Or denial.Or maybe you just don’t know what’s supposed to happen to you when you get hit by a car.Who knows? In any case, get your ass into this wheelchair.”

Trib felt himself being wheeled into X-Ray.There were people there who took pictures of his insides from all possible angles.They took his blood pressure.They took his temperature.They jabbed a needle into him and made off with some of his blood. Then they put him on a gurney and wheeled him into a treatment room. Someone pried the film container out of his hand. 

“What’s this?” said a voice. 

“Beats me,” said another. 

“Eww.Looks like cat hair.”

“Yech. Some kind of fetishist, I bet. We get more weirdos every day.Did you see the sicko that brought him in? Had some kinda weird needle sticking out of her ear. Disgusting.” The container was left on his chest, and the voices trailed off down the hall. 

Damn. They left it open. His head hurt, and he really would rather not snee…“AAAAphhhlagggh!”

“Trib?” said a voice from the next cubicle.He saw the curtain being drawn back by a delicate little hand encased in a damp plaster cast. 

“Annie?” He sat up. 

“Trib? Oh, God…” Her face went pale when she saw the purple swelling over his eye.“What happened? I keep hearing things about someone being hit by a car.”

“That was me,” he smiled reassuringly. 

“Oh, God.” Her eyes got very wide, and she started to sway a little. 

“Hey,” he said gently, gathering her up in his arms. “I’m okay.Really. ”

She tried to say something, but all that came out was a shuddering little whimper. Tears and wet plaster began to soak through his shirt. 

“Oh, so you two are a 'thing?'” The doctor came in and placed several X-rays on the viewer. 

“Probably.” Trib replied. 

“Figures,” the doctor smirked. 

“What’s that supposed to mean,” Annie sniffled defensively, drying her eyes on her sleeve. 

“Well,” the doctor continued, “Mrs.Furfine says she was going at least twenty miles an hour when she hit you. Her son says your head bounced off a concrete column.”

“ _Mrs. Furfine_ hit you?” Annie asked, incredulously. 

“I was trying to get her to stop so I could talk to her.”

“Oh, really? I suppose you’re going to tell me you couldn’t do that without jumping in front of her car.” Annie snorted indignantly. 

“Well, yeah.”

“Ahem,” the doctor interrupted the gathering storm. “As I was saying, after an impact like that, your spleen should be ruptured, your skull should be fractured, your neck should be broken and you should be, for lack of a more delicate term, roadkill.”

“And?” inquired Trib. 

“See for yourself. No broken bones, no internal bleeding.You don’t even have a concussion.”

“My head hurts,” said Trib, helpfully. “Does that mean something?”

“You’ve got a nasty bruise there. I have no doubt you have a headache. It’s what you don’t have that puzzles the hell out of me. ”

“So?”

“I have to let you go. I can give you something for the headache.”

“Let me get this straight. He’s been hit by a car and you’re just going to let him walk out of here?” Annie thought this was very unfair. Her arm hurt, she had to take a bunch of stupid pills and put up with this stupid cast, and he was going to get away with a couple of aspirin? Unfair, unfair. 

“Well, I really can’t do anything else. There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s a very lucky guy. As for you, if you want to have full use of that arm, you’ll keep the cast on and take those pills every four hours to keep the swelling down.I want to see you back here in two weeks.”

She didn’t reply. Her eyes narrowed and her face told Trib he’d better not say another word. She sat in the waiting room and fumed while Trib assured Kitty that he was all right, that he was highly unlikely to sue, and that he would like to call her very soon to discuss the incident with her son and the cat-thing. She assured him that she wouldn’t hold him responsible for the large impressive dent in the hood of her car. They exchanged telephone numbers and parted amicably. 

“Come on,” said Trib, extending a hand to Annie.“Let’s get out of here.” 


	29. Chapter 29

“It was one of those cats,” Trib said as they pulled into Annie’s driveway. “I know it was. Mrs. Furfine didn’t tell me the whole story, but I could see orange hair all over her shirt. The same hair was on her son’s shirt, too. And they were staying right near where that hiker was killed. ”

Annie opened the door, and was immediately set upon by four large dogs of questionable ancestry who had been cooped up in the house all night and wanted out _now_. The furry tide flowed around them and bounded out into the yard. 

Trib was pleased to see that her house wasn’t particularly spotless. She shoved aside a pile of magazines and motioned for him to join her on the sofa. 

“Now what do we do?”

“I'm certain the answer is in the landfill,” Trib replied. “I think someone is dumping radioactive waste out there, and it’s doing something to the dead cats -- bringing them back to life somehow."

Annie brightened. "I get it. Like _Night of the Living Dead?_ _"_

"Yeah! Like that! Hell, I don't know if that kind of thing is even possible. We need to talk to an expert."

“Doppelganger.”

“Yeah. He should be in the office now.I’ll give him a call and see if he’ll meet us out there tonight.” 

“Tonight?” Annie’s response was less than enthusiastic. "Don't you ever sleep?" 

“I’m sorry,” he said, slipping a comforting arm around her. "I wasn't thinking. If you’re not up to it, I can go by myself.”

“No, don’t do that. We’ve come this far together, and I’m not about to wimp out now. And besides,” she hesitated, looking at her feet.“Well... ”

“It would feel kind of funny going there without you.”

“Yeah, that,” she smiled a little and looked into his eyes. 

He gave her shoulder a little squeeze. He felt strong, manly, protective. He pictured himself in an action movie poster. One hand on his hip, the other around his woman, resplendent in a flowing cape and tights. Well, maybe not the tights.

“Let's do this." Trib said in his best superhero voice. He reached for the phone, wedged it precariously under his chin, and began to fumble around with the Yellow Pages. 

“Stop!” cried Annie, ducking out from under his arm. 

“What? What'd I do?” Trib wondered if his other hand was doing something scandalous that it hadn't told him about, and if not, why not. 

“Give me that.I know all about you and phones." She pried the phone out of his hand. "What’s the number?”

“This looks promising,” Trib said. "Gives us his address, too." He read the listing out loud: 

 

_J.Robert Doppelganger_

_Existential Physicist_

_LANL 555-1010 ext. 602_

_Residence 417 W. San Sebastiano Rd. 555-7766_

 

 “Yes, I need to speak to Dr.Doppelganger, please.” A pause. “Dr.Doppelganger. No, I don’t want to speak to someone else in the department.He what?” Longer pause.“Really?” she lowered the phone for a second and made a ' _what the hell_?' face. “No thank you, I don’t want to leave a message. I’ll try his home number. Thanks.”

She turned to Trib. “He’s not there. He didn’t come in at all today. Missed an extremely important meeting and everyone’s really pissed off. She said he’s not at home either, but I’m going to try it anyway.” She tried the other number. It rang three times... four... the answering machine picked up. 

"Hello," droned the recorded voice. "I’m currently in an indefinable state of existence, in which case it may be impossible for me to answer the phone. Or I may be in the bathroom. In any case, if you do in fact think you exist, leave your name and number at the tone and I shall att... " There was a soft whuffling noise, then a crash as the phone fell to the floor. Then silence.


	30. Chapter 30

Trib had dozed off in the passenger seat, dreaming that four immense dogs were performing the Mexican hat dance around him as he sat atop a giant sombrero filled with radioactive waste. The sudden deceleration of the car caused him to wake up just as they were pulling into Dr. Doppelganger's driveway. It looked awfully ramshackle to belong to a world-renowned nuclear physicist, although the Lexus parked to the side was none too shabby.

He knocked on the door, with results that could be described as only partially successful. Lots of noise, but no answer. He tried the knob. Locked. 

"Tell me you aren't planning on breaking in," Annie sighed. “Of course you are. Wait a sec. Don’t touch anything.”She hurried to the car and took a box of latex exam gloves out of the trunk. She put on a pair and tossed the box to Trib, who did the same. She wiped the doorknob with her sleeve.

Trib smiled a weary, but slightly mischievous smile. "You’re ready for everything, aren’t you? Come on, let's go around back," he suggested. Halfway there, he stopped and gestured for Annie to wait. 

"Ahhplaghph!"

"Bless you. You know what that means. It’s been here. Look at that window!"

It was open, cracked ever so slightly behind partially closed shutters, as if to let in some fresh air. Hanging from the outside of the sill were the now-familiar tufts of orange cat hair. 

Trib clambered inside, and yelled, with a grin on his face, "It's been here! There's cat hair all over the place!"

He helped Annie climb in, and the look on her face told him something was wrong.Trib turned around and saw it: A man, lying open-mouthed and motionless on the bed, his dull, lifeless eyes staring at the ceiling. His chest and face were covered with orange fluff. 

"Eww. Is he dead?" Annie asked. 

Trib looked closer. “He looks pretty dead.” He poked the body with his finger, trying not to gag. “Not for long, though. Body's still warm. We’d best call the cops."

"Yeah, right. So they can arrest us for breaking in. Let's get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.” She looked at the dead body and shivered a little. "We're not just going to leave him here, are we?”

“Like I said, we have to call the cops.”

"I know. We can call them from a pay phone," Annie suggested. "We won't have to give our names, and they won’t be able to trace it back to us.”

“Good idea," Trib replied. 

"Just a second." Trib said. He walked back over to the dresser, which was covered with money. _Lots_ of money. Stacks and stacks of large bills. There was also a textbook: _The Particles of Confederation_ , by J. Robert Doppelganger. 

"This might tell us something we need to know," he said, and tucked it under his arm. He climbed out the window and headed for the car. 

Annie stopped. There was something else on the dresser. She hung behind for a minute, digging amongst the currency. 

Trib poked his head in the window. "C'mon, Annie. Can you hurry it up? I thought you wanted to get out of here?"

"You know that book you said would tell us something?"

“Yeah?” He helped her climb through the window, then smoothed out the footprints in the flower bed. 

"This will tell us more," Annie grinned, pulling a little spiral notebook from the pocket of her lab coat. "It's his diary. "


	31. Chapter 31

Annie sat curled up on the sofa, devouring the words in Doppelganger's diary.Soon the dogs began to bark, telling her that Trib had found a pay phone, called the police, and reported having knowledge of a dead body in a room filled with a great deal of cash. With any luck at all, he had also located a pizza. She was starving. She got up and let him in. The dogs followed, their eyes locked lustfully upon the pizza box. 

"Well?" Trib asked, setting the pizza down on the coffee table. Four big furry bodies lay in a row, chins resting on the edge of the table. Four cold black noses twitched in restless anticipation while eight liquid, pleading eyes tried their best to look starving and deprived. 

"Well what?" Annie returned to the couch and tucked her feet under her, gazing steadily at him over the spine of the diary. 

He gazed back. He didn’t know if it was the look in her eyes or the bump on his head, but he found himself getting a little dizzy. It gave him a good excuse to sit next to her. "Well, did you find anything?"

“Yes." She lowered her eyes to the dogeared pages. A tiny smile flickered across her face. 

"What, is it classified top secret or something?" He inched closer. 

She held the little green notebook at arm's length. "Yes." The smile broadened in spite of itself. 

"Are you going to let me see it?"

"Eventually." The smile deteriorated into a giggle. 

"Gimme that." 

"No."

The ensuing skirmish over the diary resulted in a lot of wrestling and laughing.This eventually led to a lot of wrestling and laughing that had nothing whatsoever to do with the notebook, which soon found itself squashed beneath Trib's right shoulder blade. It tried to get his attention by poking him with the end of its spiral-wire binding, without much success. Then the laughing suddenly stopped, meaning that Trib's lips had found Annie's, and the notebook, like the pizza, would have to wait its turn.

What happened next is the stuff of legend and limerick. 

Robert James Waller firmly believes that photographers make the most exciting lovers. Stevie Nicks believes this of musicians. Madonna believes it of dancers, athletes, models, actors, and strangers. Others believe that excitement is related to wealth, degree of experience, anatomical originality, or the creative use of food. For quite some time that morning, all of them were completely, utterly wrong. 

The first thing Trib noticed was that Annie was even more amazing than he'd imagined. He softened his kiss to match hers, feeling her body dissolve in his arms, letting himself melt into her like snow in the morning sun. Their lips parted only long enough for her to look into his eyes and smile. Oh, that smile. Their fear, uncertainty, and pain were forgotten for a while as she drew him to her lips again. 

Trib was excited. He knew she knew he was excited, and that excited him even more. The diary fell from the sofa to the floor, followed by various pieces of clothing, followed by Trib and Annie. 

"Ow," said Trib, grateful for the fact that she had fallen on top of him instead of the other way around. 

Annie whispered into his ear. "Perhaps we ought to continue this conversation in the bedroom before someone gets hurt." 

Trib agreed. 

The clothes complained that the bedsheets were going to be impossible to deal with for at least a couple of weeks.The four dogs looked at each other for a few seconds, grinned in greedy agreement, and broke into the pizza. 

Meanwhile, in the other room, Annie and Trib were busy forgetting about their respective injuries and giving the sheets something to gossip about. She stroked the muscles of his chest with the fingertips of her good hand; he ran his hands over the generous curves of her body, closing them behind her in a tender embrace. Gently and carefully, like a spring wind stirring the surface of a pond, they made love. 

Afterwards, there were no clichés exchanged. Trib looked down at Annie and watched her as she slept, nestled in the crook of his arm with her cheek resting against his chest. A warm wave of contentment washed over him as he wrapped himself around her, then drifted into an exhausted, grateful sleep. 


	32. Chapter 32

Annie woke up first, to the sound of the dogs barking. Then there was a knock at the door.She peered out the window to see the police chief's squad car parked behind hers in the driveway. 

"Shit," she muttered, and leaned over to wake Trib.

Trib stirred slightly, a contented smile appearing on his face as he drifted along on a rubber raft, one hand trailing in the warm Caribbean waters and the other stroking Annie's soft brown hair. He was in the process of discovering that centrifugal force was a lovely invention indeed, as the gentle rocking motion of the raft brought her body pleasantly into contact with his. He turned slowly and drew her into a long, passionate kiss. 

The rocking motion increased, and he decided that a storm must be imminent. He was actually becoming a little seasick. 

_BANG!_ The thunder that had been rumbling in the distance suddenly rent the sky with a resounding crack directly over his head. 

"Wha?" Trib sat up suddenly. 

_BANG! Bang, bang, bang. BARK bark bark BARK bark bark._

As the dream dissipated, Trib's first waking thoughts materialized.Annie was shaking him. A huge black wake-up dog was helpfully licking his hand. Someone was banging on the door, and the other dogs were bounding about in a flurry of excited barking. 

"God, Trib," said Annie, hurriedly pulling a T-shirt over her head and fumbling with a pair of jeans. "If you hadn't been snoring so loud I'd have given you up for dead."

She was trying to zip up her pants, find her left shoe, and brush her hair all at the same time. Trib found this enchanting. He reached for her, but managed only fleeting contact with a portion of shirttail as she slipped off the bed. 

Her eyes met his for a moment, and she stopped long enough to plant a soft kiss on his forehead. "I have to get the door."

"Who is it?"

"The chief of police. Geez, I thought you said you called from a pay phone."

"I did."

"And you didn't give our names?"

"No."

"Beats me what he's doing here then.” She walked out, muttering a string of curse words under her breath. Trib started to follow, then realized that he couldn't. His clothes, with the exception of his underpants and a single sock, were still out in the living room. He contented himself with eavesdropping through the bedroom door. 

The front door creaked, and the river of dogs flowed out, stopping momentarily to give a casual but nonetheless embarrassing sniff to the crotch of the uniformed obstruction in the doorway.Annie ushered Chief Gonzales into the room. 

"Hi, Harry. Sorry I took so long," she said. "You woke me up."

Gonzales raised his eyebrows and looked at his watch. It was three o'clock in the afternoon. 

Annie noticed him glancing down at the pile of clothing on the floor. Concealed among the clothes lay a small green notebook. She nudged it under the sofa with her foot. 

"Well," she said, "I was tired. I was up all night. Seems someone wanted me to analyze some cat hair. You want some coffee?"

"Sure," said Gonzales. He watched her as she went into the kitchen, noting her rumpled appearance. Sure, she had good reason to look tired, but something wasn't quite right here.And there were those clothes on the floor. A man's sock. And that pair of Reeboks. Much too big to fit those feminine little feet. Hmmm. What was that she was so careful to conceal under the sofa? He bent down to reach underneath. 

"Cream and sugar?" Annie made sure her question was loud and sharp enough to make him sit up and get his sneaky hand out from under her couch. 

"Yes, please," he replied. 

The microwave beeped. Spoons clinked. Annie returned to the sofa, pushing aside a badly mangled pizza box to make room for two steaming mugs. 

"Sorry, it's instant," she apologized, looking at him over the rim of her cup.Surreptitiously she nudged the diary a little farther under the sofa. 

"What happened to your arm?" 

"Oh, that. I had a little accident on my way home last night."

"So I heard."

Annie froze. "Oh?"

"A certain Mr. Ed Felfork, security guard at the Happy Pig Campground, says that two people matching the description of you and that newspaper guy... the nosy gringo who's always writing that stuff about toxic waste. What's his name?"

"Inkwell," Annie said resignedly. “Trib Inkwell. He’s a friend.”

"Yeah, Inkwell. You and he were poking around a Mrs. Furfine's campsite. This Mrs. Furfine says that she met the two of you at the all-night clinic. Is that true?"

"Yes," said Annie. "After that hair analysis I did for you, I got curious. I drove around. I saw some sort of weird cat-thing run across the road. It went up a tree. I followed it up the tree. I fell out of the tree, and broke my arm. Trib drove me to the clinic. Nothing illegal in that, Harry."

"No, but there is something illegal in murder." He put his hand on her knee, just for effect. 

She glared at him and removed the hand. "I would think so, yes."

"Well, I just thought you should know we got an anonymous tip this morning that there's been another killing. Seems one of the lab scientists didn't show up for work. We found him dead in his bed, all covered with that same orange fluff. There was evidence that some person or persons had broken into his house."

"Really? That's awful." Annie put down her cup. Her hand was beginning to shake, and the little ripples in the coffee were threatening to splash over the edge. 

"Was anything... er... missing?" She gulped down the hard knot that had formed in her throat. 

"Funny you should mention that. The motive can't have been robbery. There was money. Lots of it. All over the place."

"And what does this have to do with me?"

"We're bringing you back into the investigation. Something tells me you know more about this than you're letting on. You said you went looking for cats. What did you find?"

"Chief," Annie began, "You're not going to believe this."

"Try me." The pudgy policeman leaned forward, his small, sharp eyes alight with interest. 

"Have you ever heard of sailcats?"

 

(TO BE CONTINUED.)


End file.
